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Here at don’t you tell me how i feel, we have a soft spot in our mean little hearts for monkeys. So Matthew Dear’s song is right up our alley.

Dearie is a Brooklyn-based hyphenate, according to his website:

“Depending on whom you ask, Matthew Dear is a DJ, a dance-music producer, an experimental pop artist, a bandleader…He straddles multiple musical worlds and belongs to none—and he’s just hitting his stride.”

Modest he ain’t.

The new album, Black City, is quite the danceable thing, with echo-laden half-robot-growl vocals throughout. But what I found most interesting was the album’s limited edition element — Dear and co. produced 100 “totems” that give customers access to digital streaming and other Dear content. The site explains:
“More than a mere limited edition, the totem is a proposal, an entreaty to listeners everywhere to reconsider our relationship to music in the digital era. In producing an object as the embodiment of Black City, Matthew Dear and Ghostly International suggest a new path through which one’s physical relationship to an album is again explored.”

I initially balked at this idea (what the crap, really), but on second thought, it’s fascinating to consider that music packaging can really be anything we want now. The package, if one exists, is often just a conduit for information that you’ll access via the web anyway, so musicians can create some physical manifestation of their musical concept. “Music” can therefore be delivered as stuffed elephants or Russian nesting dolls or curtain rods or blenders.